Film history and film
preservation:
reconstructing the text of The joyless
street
(1925)(1)
Jan-Christopher
Horak
Uploaded
16 November 1998 | 5,600 words
Abstract
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(1) This
is a revised version of "Der Fall Die freudlose
Gasse. eine Rekonstruktion im Münchner Filmmuseum",
in: Ursula von Keitz (ed.): Frühe Filme, späte
Folgen. Restaurierung, Rekonstruktion und
Neupräsentation historische Kinematographie
(Marburg: Schüren, 1998) translated from the German by
J.-C. Horak.
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I. Introduction
Film history is like a massive graveyard in which lost films
are buried, never again to be recovered or seen. As in life,
the dead outnumber the living by a long shot. Although we
have only just celebrated the first centenary of cinema, the
statistics of mortality are frightening. Of all the films
produced during the silent era, i.e. between 1895 and 1930,
approximately 90% have been lost. In other words, only ten
percent of all films from that era are still in existence.
Of all films produced during the nitrate sound film era,
i.e. between 1930 and 1955, only about 50% survive in any
form. Independent, avant-garde, and documentary filmmakers
are notoriously unconcerned about their past work, once a
film has played its commercial run. They are justifiably
more interested in finding the funding for their next
project. Meanwhile, the negatives are lost, the remaining
distribution copies are routinely destroyed or worn out
through continual use. Films disappear from view and
consciousness, unless some interested party manages to put a
print away for safe-keeping.
Even the films that have survived are not necessarily safe.
Many films only exist in mutilated form or in foreign
archives or in the hands of commercial interests unconcerned
with anything but the profit motive. Films made in certain
wide screen formats or with specific now obsolete sound
systems or most colour films from the last three decades are
in grave danger. Unprotected nitrate films continue to
decompose in the vaults, due to chemical instability and
adverse climate conditions. Acetate films are subject to
vinegar syndrome, i.e. they, too, have now been found to
decompose, as a result of insufficient temperature and
humidity controls. Colour films not based on imbibition
colour systems (where the negative is actually black &
white) are subject to fading, so that eventually only a
monochromatic magenta remains.
We now live in the age of video and seemingly instant
accessibility. Most non-professionals believe that every
film ever made has already been transferred to video and is
now just waiting for a push of the VCR button. It needs to
be emphasized that the project of film preservation and
restoration is far from completed. The great majority of
films presently housed in the film archives are not
archivally secured. It is estimated that in the United
States alone nearly 35 million meters of nitrate film remain
unprotected. When we begin to scratch the surface of the
acetate era, when we begin to think about color
preservation, when we consider the many "obsolete"
wide-screen formats of the 1950s, then the work of film
archiving is not even close to completion. The preservation
of only the first 100 years of cinema will take at least
until the middle of the next century, maybe longer.
Given these huge gaps in the accessibility of historically
important film titles, it stands to reason that the writing
of film history is also a function of film preservation, and
vice versa. On the one hand, film preservation
priorities are established in the film archives, according
to the classical texts of film history. On the other hand,
film history can only be revised, if film archives make
certain film titles available. In other words, a symbiotic
relationship exists between film preservation and film
history.
I would like to illustrate this point with a film classic,
that has been seemingly available for years and is a
standard offering in many film history courses. Dozens of
film historians have written about the film, yet it is my
contention that none of the historians writing about the
film has ever seen The joyless street. Until now.
Anglo-American film critics have relied on the version
distributed by Kino International, a bastardized version of
The joyless street, which in no way resembles the
original. The Kino print is based on a French version that
survives at the Cinémathèque Française
which is missing more than four reels from its original
length of 3,700 meters.
II. The joyless street - a damaged
masterpiece
Die freudlose Gasse(The joyless street), directed
Georg Wilhelm Pabst from a script by Willy Haas, based on a
novel by Hugo Bettauer, is not only one of the most
important films of the Weimar Republic, it is also one of
the most spectacular censorship cases of the era. While the
film made its director famous, the state institutions of
control guaranteed that no one would ever see the film in
its original form. The film was considered too much of a
provocation. Its story from the inflationary period in
Vienna in the years immediately after World War I offered
enough dynamite for several muckraking novels: nouveau
riches currency and stock market speculators who wallow
in Babylonian luxury, homeless and unemployed
Lumpenproletariat living in barns, women who sell
their souls for a bit of fresh meat at the butcher's,
arrogant but impoverished former bureaucrats unaware of
their social slide, young social climbers willing to
prostitute themselves with high society women, sexual orgies
and bordellos, murder out of jealousy, murder out of
despair, and, finally, a revolution in the streets.
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Contemporary film critics, as well as film historians
have always recognized The joyless street as a
seminal film, a film on the border between German
Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (new realism).
Two quotes from contemporary reviews may illustrate the
point: the Berliner Tageblatt wrote: "In terms of its
acting, this is a beautiful film with great direction and
wonderful
actors."(2)
In fact, the film starred Asta Nielsen, Werner Kraus, Hertha
von Walter, and a young Greta Garbo who would go on to a
stellar career in Hollywood. In the Deutsche Allgemeine
Zeitung, Otto Friedrich wrote:
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(2)
"Die freudlose Gasse", in: Berliner Tageblatt,
Nr. 237 (20 May 1925).
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He (Pabst) achieves his goal in great style,
does not tread on well-worn paths, presents new ideas
which are uniquely his own, and with this achievement
gives us a new hope. He captures the atmosphere of an
idea, keeps redrawing it on the surface in ever more
intensive images, in contrasts of action that make an
ever stronger impression. He illustrates the down-trodden
souls of the era and the manic lust for pleasure of its
people who are trying to do nothing more than escape for
a few minutes from the terrible truth of the present.
(3)
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(3) Otto
Friedrich, " Die freudlose Gasse", in: Deutsche
Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 239 (23 May 1925).
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In this context it is interesting to note that both Lotte
Eisner and Siegfried Kraucauer characterized the film as
unsuccessful, claiming it to be too melodramatic, too
stereotypical, too over-laden with symbolism. Eisner indeed
criticized the film's blending of expressionistic symbolism
with a realism characteristic of the later Pabst. Yet one
must remember that both Kracauer and Eisner only had access
to mutilated versions of The joyless street, or
reviews of mutilated
versions.(4)
In point of fact, the film was chopped up,
mutilated and censored, like no other film in the Weimar
Republic. Only a few short years after the film's premiere,
Paul Rotha described its fate in The film till
now:
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(4)See
Lotte Eisner, The haunted screen (Berkeley, CA.:
University of California Press, 1969), p. 256; Siegfried
Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler. a psychological study
of German cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1947), p. 67. While Kracauer probably only had access
to reviews and his own memory of the film, Eisner viewed the
surviving print at the Cinémathèque
Française.
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The film was shot in 38 days, since they worked
sixteen hours a day. When it was finished it had a length
of 3700 meters, almost as long as Ben Hur or
The big parade. France immediately trimmed 700
meters, including every shot of the street. The Viennese
cut without reason every scene in which Werner Kraus was
seen as the butcher. In Russia the Lieutenant is
transformed into a doctor and the butcher the murderer
(instead of the girl). After a year, the German censors
went back to work. In England the film was banned
altogether and shown only once at a London Film Society
screening.(5)
view
images "Sequence A"
Not only was the film cut for political and moral reasons
in every country where it was publicly shown, it was also
reedited in order to close the huge gaps created by
censorship cuts. Thus, in almost every country totally
different narratives of The joyless street emerged.
According to Mark Sorkin, Pabst's editor, he and Pabst had
made the first cuts the night before the premiere, because
the theatre owner insisted the film be shortened.
While the first version of The joyless street still
had a length of 3738 meters (only four meters were initially
cut by the censorship board on 25 May 1925), the film was
back in court on 29 March 1926, because the police had
issued a decree calling for a total ban on the film, due to
its "lewd" and " seditious" tendencies. Now only 3477 meters
remained of the film. None of the later surviving versions
ever came close to this length. Neither a German version,
nor the original German censorship cards are known to
exist.
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(5) Paul
Rotha, The film till now: the film since then
(London: Spring Books, 1970), p. 37.
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As a result, film historians have only seen mutilated
versions that in no way represent the original, leading them
to false conclusions, based on evidence that only existed in
such false versions. For example, Patrice Petro's close
analysis of the film in Joyless streets: women and
melodramatic representation in Weimar
Germany(6)
does consider two different versions of the film, but
neither one was even close to genuine, so that her
conclusions are off the mark. She also fails to consider the
provenance of the two versions, just as most film historians
have failed in their analyses to take into account the
extreme losses suffered by film history. Unlike literary
critics studying sources and versions in print, film
historians often assume the film they are seeing is the
text. However, no two film prints are alike, and the final
editor of a film is the projectionist who has removed his
favorite scenes for his personal collection.
In 1989, Enno Patalas of the Munich Filmmuseum attempted a
first restoration of The joyless street. That
reconstruction was based on three different versions: a
print from the Cinémathèque Française
with French intertitles (2,309 m); a version with English
intertitles from the National Film and TV Archive at the
British Film Institute, London (2,168 m); and a print with
Russian intertitles from Gosfilmofond, Moscow (2,950m),
which, however, included at least forty meters of material
from other films. All three copies differed from each other
not only in their length and intertitles, but also in terms
of their editing of scenes and shots. During the course of
this first reconstruction, which took as its guide an
original script with notations by Mark Sorkin, several
seemingly unsolvable problems arose:
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(6)
Patrice Pietro, Joyless streets. women and melodramatic
representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 201ff.
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1. The completely different editing structures in the
three versions, as well as the absence of censorship cards,
which would have allowed for the intertitles to be
reconstructed,(7)
made an exact reconstruction of the original version
impossible. While every surviving shot could be identified,
numerous scenes were still missing, so that huge gaps in
narrative logic remained. Furthermore, Patalas designed new
titles from dialogue in the script.
2. The script only approximated the completed film: a number
of scenes described in the script were not shot (according
to Mark Sorkin's hand-written notes in the margins); other
scenes which were supposedly not produced, actually showed
up in surviving prints; other scenes were constructed
differently or appeared at a different point in the
film.
3. The varying quality of the three prints - all of them
positive prints from dupe negatives from nitrate originals -
made it difficult to achieve a unified look. Since the
original nitrate prints were not viewed, it was also
impossible to tell where splices had been made, evidence
which would have indicated where scenes, shots or titles had
been removed. Also, the tinting and toning - two of the
nitrate prints were tinted - could not be reconstructed from
the b & w dupes acquired by Patalas.
Other problems only became apparent, once work on a second
reconstuction commenced.
III. Close analysis at an editing table
In 1995, the Munich Filmmuseum applied to the "Project
Lumiere" of the European Union's Media I Project for funds
to attempt a new reconstruction of The joyless
street. In particular, the rediscovery of the
Cinémathèque Française's original,
tinted nitrate print made such a new project feasible and
desirable. Furthermore, the planned complete retrospective
of all of Pabst's films at the Berlin Film Festival in
February 1997 offered another incentive for once again
attempting a more complete reconstruction. However, at the
time the decision was made, the reconstruction team,
consisting of Jan-Christopher Horak, Gerhard Ullmann and
Klaus Volkmer could hardly have imagined how complicated the
reconstruction would become or that totally new sources
would turn up in the course of their work.
In the Spring of 1996 the Munich Filmmuseum requested from
its FIAF partners all surviving nitrate prints of the film,
i.e. a survey of all surviving materials and their origin
was made. Of the 21 copies from Austria, Germany, the United
States, Canada, Great Britain, Italy, Hungary, etc. five
projection prints were identified as Ur-nitrate
prints:
1) a print from the estate of film
collector/distributor, Raymond Rohauer, (now deposited at
the Library of Congress), which had served as pre-print
material for the British Film Institute's safety dupe
negative (London).
2) the Cinémathèque Française
tinted print (Paris).
3) a print from the Cineteca di Milano with French
intertitles which had apparently been cut together from
two different versions, and only partially identical to
the French print (Milan).
4) the Russian print from Gosfilmofond which had two
different typographies in the intertitles, leading to the
conclusion that the original version had later been
reworked (Moscow).
5) a 59-minuted version from George Eastman House,
Rochester, which James Card had bought from a Cleveland
junk dealer in the early 1960s. This version had English
intertitles and had apparently been released after Greta
Garbo's rise to fame in America in an attempt to cash in
on her star attraction (Rochester).
After requesting and receiving these five nitrate
originals, an exact shot by shot protocol was made of all
five prints, as well as correcting and updating the shot
protocol of Munich's first reconstruction. We soon
ascertained that these prints originated from two different
negatives which had been cut differently and also used
different shots and angles. The London and Paris prints, and
half of the Milan print came from one negative, and the
Rochester and Moscow prints and the other half of the Milan
print from a second negative. Thus, a first theory that
there had been a negative for the domestic German version
and a second negative for foreign release was shot to
pieces, since we were dealing exclusively with foreign
prints. According to Mark Sorkin's notes, he and Pabst had
simply cut an "A" and a "B" negative.
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(7)
German censorship records were published on so-called
censorship cards. Those cards listed all intertitles in
numerical order that had been passed by the censors. Based
on such records, it is often possible to reconstruct the
narratives of German silent films, even when no intertitles
survive. Unfortunately, no censorship cards for The
joyless street have surfaced to date.
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We realized very quickly that we would not be able to
reconstitute either an A or a B negative, since none of the
prints were anywhere near complete, but rather we could only
complete a synthetic version from the two negatives.
Furthermore, we knew that within a single scene, we would
have to choose between shots from negative A or negative B,
since it was impossible to match shots within a scene from
the different negatives, without risking losing the film's
elegance. At the same time, it was clear from seeing the
original nitrates that the image quality of the London,
Paris, and Rochester version was vastly superior to all
surviving dupes and that at the very least we could improve
the surface image in our restoration. We also noted that
each version had different scenes missing, i.e. all the
versions ended with a happy end between Greta and Lieutenant
Davy, except the Russian one, which ended with the burning
down of the bordello. The Rochester version, on the other
hand, while extremely short, included a few key shots and
scenes, not found in any other version. For example, we
discovered a freeze frame of three naked women in a
tableaux vivant on a nightclub stage. My first
impulse was to assume that the shot had been added later by
James Card, not an impossibility, if one knew Card's
predilections or our discovery that the Moscow version
included footage from at least two other
films.(8)
However, the fact that the shot was nitrate and no splice
could be found forced us to look at the shot more closely.
After examining the nightclub scenes in other prints with a
lupe, we noticed the silhouette of a naked woman at the edge
of one shot where Greta flees the nightclub. That silhouette
perfectly matched our freeze frame image.
The first step, then, was to make a dupe negative of the
complete London nitrate, since we decided to use this as our
base print, due to its superior image quality and the length
of its shots. In addition, dupe negatives were made of all
those scenes and sections from the other versions which were
either missing in the London print or were possibly of
better image quality. Work prints were then generated from
all new negative materials.
Working from the London version, a rough cut was put
together in four separate passes, during which scenes and
shots from the Milan, Paris, Moscow, and Rochester copies
were successively incorporated into the English print. In
order to facilitate constant comparison between the five
versions and check our own work, we generated VHS-video
transfers for easier reference of every version, including a
German version, produced in the former GDR, and the first
Munich reconstruction. We also made sure that we never
"mixed negatives" within a scene, as stated above.
During the ensuing fine cut, we realized that not only had
numerous scenes been removed or altered, due to censorship
cuts, but also that various narrative strands had been
totally mixed up. It was therefore not just a matter of
adding missing material, the most complex part of the job
lay in discovering the film's original editing structure.
The editors responsible for the various foreign versions had
indeed taken incredible liberties. Scenes were chopped to
pieces, shots from the end of the film were put at the
beginning, or vice versa, longer shots were cut up into
shorter ones with other images slapped in-between. As a
result, persons often appeared in two different scenes at
the same time or shots from one scene were cut into another
scene. For example, a close-up of a female piano player with
a cigar in the corner of her mouth appeared in a nightclub
at the end of the film in the London and Moscow versions,
yet this woman was no where to be found in the long shots of
the same scene - on the contrary, a male dance band was seen
playing in the establishing shot. It was only during the
third pass that we noticed this very same piano player -
very small - in a corner of the bordello scene at the
beginning of the film.
IV. Approaching Pabst's realism
In order to create a fine cut out of this seeming chaos,
without censorship cards or an original print, the
restoration team formulated a working thesis, namely that
G.W. Pabst had for the most part attempted a realistic
narrative, i.e. spatial and temporal relationships
functioned chronologically. Although Pabst had not yet
perfected his technique of invisible editing on movement,
the plot had to make narrative sense. Characters could not
be in two places at once, their movement from one space to
another had to fit into a realistic space/time continuum. An
exact philological analysis of each shot was therefore
necessary. Diagrams were drawn of individual rooms and
spaces, based on spaces, movements and looks within the
frame, allowing us to reconstruct sets in space, while the
many individual sub-plots were painstakingly chronicled.
Again and again the team discovered "mistakes", e.g. Patrice
Pietro describes how the butcher's large dog runs after his
murderer, a series of shots found in at least two versions.
Yet, close analysis of the shots revealed that the woman is
running on a cobblestone street pavement, while the dog is
on a wooden floor, and therefore must have been in a
completely different scene which, as it turned out, was
still almost completely missing, forcing us to throw out the
shot completely (this was one of only three shots that could
not be inserted into the completed film). On the other hand,
the team noticed that transitions would suddenly work and
the editing structure became much smoother, once shots had
been reordered according to our method of close analysis.
Pabst was indeed very close to a classical narrative style
as our "matched" cuts (if they were from the same negative)
proved.
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(8)
Having worked for Card in the 1970s, I could imagine him
fooling with the print. I was able to identify an extensive
stock market scene as originating in Joe May's 1923
four-part, German serial, Tragödie der Liebe.
Another long night club scene from an unidentified film was
also clearly inserted into the film.
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In the course of our work, the team developed a second
working thesis, the so-called "Potemkin-Principle":
If a shot had been placed in the wrong place, or, as was the
case in the Moscow print, duplicate shots from elsewhere in
the film were
inserted,(9)
one could assume with certainty that a scene or sequence of
shots had been removed. For example, we discovered that the
rape scene in the butcher shop (unseen in the meat locker)
was rendered harmless by inserting a shot of Maria's father
walking down the street. Thus, in the censored version it
appears as if Maria is scared, because she hears her father
(which in fact makes no narrative sense because he can't see
her in the basement), rather than the rape of her
girlfriend, occurring in the meat locker. Thanks to our
hypothesis, the team also discovered the film's complex
flash-back structure.
view
images "Sequence B"
Despite the fact that the Paris version included several
scenes of Maria's murder of the lawyer's wife, Enno Patalas
had removed the second of these scenes, because Maria's
confession at the end of the film explained all. It was
however my opinion that the presentation of the scene three
times, each time revealing a bit more, corresponded to
silent film conventions: the first time, one sees Asta
Nielsen looking into the next room, where she discovers her
boyfriend with another woman; the second time, she relates
how she has witnessed the murder to her customer, Canez; the
third time, she confesses the murder in the police station.
However, it was not until we discovered a duplicate shot
where the first flashback should have been that my team
accepted my opinion.
Another important discovery in relation to the film's
overall narrative structure was made when we attempted to
incorporate a number of shots from two reels of "outtakes"
that had been discovered in Berlin by film archivist Martin
Koerber at the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek. The two reels
included actual outtakes, shots from several unidentified
films, and two sequences which were eventually identified as
belonging to three different scenes from The joyless
street. Of major consequence for our edit were several
shots with Greta Garbo at a table with the speculator
Rosenow and other shots with Davy's friend, James, and an
unidentified companion looking from their nightclub table at
something. These shots were in no other version, but we were
able to identify them in the script. The question was,
however, where did they fit into the film? We only knew
about the seduction scene with the butcher, which had been
placed after Davy's departure from the flat.
Only after repeated viewings of the crucial scene in the
apartment did we notice that James actually recognizes Greta
and then begins to push Davy out of the flat which meant
that he must have assumed that she was a prostitute, because
he had seen her in the bordello with Rosenow. We concluded
that not only did the shots with Greta/Rosenow and those
with James/companion belong together in a scene before Davy
moves out, but that also the scene with Greta/the butcher
had to come much earlier. For the first time there appeared
a clear motivation, why James literally drags Davy from the
flat, even as Greta tries to hold him back. More
importantly, the whole dramaturgy of the Rumfort's economic
plight, forcing Greta again and again to find money for
food, because the family funds keep disappearing, suddenly
became clear. Greta indeed nearly prostitutes herself three
times in the course of the film, until she is finally
rescued by Davy, providing the second of three climaxes.
A second dramatic structure involving Marie continually
listening at doorways and then looking in, thus setting a
whole chain of unhappy circumstances in motion (as in
Pandora's box, in which she starred two years
earlier) also became visible as work progressed. Thus, the
more we worked, the more we realized that Pabst had created
editing patterns and rhythms which had never been evident in
any of the censored versions.
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(9) The
Munich Filmmuseum staff had noticed during the
reconstruction of Potemkin that the Russians were
fond of duping shots from other parts of the film and
inserting them, when footage had been removed. The concept
also refers to Potemkin Villages.
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V. The mystery of Joyless street's
intertitles
After we completed the first fine cut, the restoration team
turned to the intertitles. We had originally assumed that we
would be able to use the intertitles made for the first
Munich reconstruction of 1989. However, the massive changes
brought about by our reediting of scenes forced us to
reconsider our procedure. It was only at that point that I
learned that the German intertitles had been formulated
wholesale by Patalas from dialogue in the script. All along,
I had had the feeling that there were both too many
intertitles and that the titles were too long. Intertitles
in silent films were usually added after the fact and kept
to a minimum, while the dialogue in the script was
understood to be help for the actors creating a character,
rather than what they were actually saying. The first scene
in the Hotel Carlton is exemplary in this respect: A number
of persons approach the speculator Canez, in order to get
him to invest in their schemes. Five intertitles had been
cut into the scene, although the scene worked without any
intertitles, and, as we later realized, based on evidence
from a German censorship report from 1926, probably was
shown without titles. We decided, therefore, to proceed
completely
differently.(10)
First, we electronically photographed and translated every
single intertitle from all five foreign versions, as well as
from the GDR version, and pasted them together in sequence.
By comparing the intertitles side by side we were able to
discover which titles were used in two or more versions. In
a first pass we only added those titles which were
documented in several versions, since we assumed that they
had probably been translated from the original German. In a
few spots we then had to use intertitles from the script,
because there were no corresponding scenes in any of the
surviving versions, e.g. the scene with Garbo/Rosenow.
In a next step, we compared our intertitles with a German
censorship report from 1926. This text quotes directly or
indirectly numerous intertitles from the original version,
but, more importantly it numbered the quoted titles
sequentially (reel X, title XY). Inexplicably, this report
had not been consulted during the first reconstruction for
creating intertitles, but rather merely as a guide to plot
construction. We thus began counting titles in each reel and
soon noticed that some reels still had too many intertitles.
We also realized that some scenes were still in the wrong
place, and were able to make corrections. Now the
reconstructed film has ten intertitles less than the first
reconstruction (236 vs. 245), although a number of new
scenes have been added. Seventy new titles were eventually
generated, while the remaining titles were close enough to
the titles in the foreign versions to be reused.
Thus, the new reconstruction has a length of almost 3,000
meters (only slightly longer than the Moscow print), but has
been almost totally reedited in comparison to all previously
known prints. While the literature describes versions
centered around two major female figures, Marie (Nielsen)
and Greta (Garbo), the new reconstruction has four major
female characters: Else (Hertha von Walter), Marie, Greta,
and Regina Rosenow (Agnes Esterhazy) who represent every
class in post World War I Vienna: homeless
"Lumpenproletariat", working class, destitute middle class,
and nouveau riche upper middle class. Around these
four female figures Pabst constructs a true tableau
vivant of more than eighteen characters, whose
individual stories reveal the era's social inequalities as
surely as the naked women in the nightclub expose their
bodies. The first reel is nothing more than one long
narrative of exposition, introducing virtually all the
characters and their circumstances, giving the film a
previously unrecognized depth. Over the next eight reels
these stories are continuously interweaved, making this film
a true masterpiece.
VI. Giving The joyless street its colour
After the Munich Filmmuseum's reconstruction of The
joyless street was premiered at the Berlin Film Festival
in February 1997, work continued on the film. First, the new
dupe negative was cut together to match the work print. Then
a colour plan had to devised to tint and tone any prints
made from the new negative. This was not an easy procedure
either, since the tints in the London and Paris versions
were not identical (the Rochester material was tinted amber
throughout), and many new scenes were in neither of those
two versions, so that there was no evidence to guide our
tinting for those scenes.
We therefore decided to use the Paris version as our primary
guide, and only consult the London version, when the scene
was missing in the French print. We decided to take this
course of action, because the colours in the Paris version
were simply richer, although we were also well aware that
Pabst had insisted on a very limited palette of colour,
mostly browns, greens, and yellow tints and tones. Once we
had identified the colour in every existing colour scene, we
tried to see whether there was any pattern to the tinting.
We noticed that certain spaces were indeed consistently
coloured (except in night scenes), and therefore continued
to use the same colour in shots we only had in black and
white. Only in one case, the fire scene at the end of the
film, did we use a colour tint without direct documentation:
in that case, we followed silent film conventions and tinted
the scene red. However, imperfections in the Russian
material strongly indicated that the scene had been tinted
some colour.
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(10) In
the Berlin outtakes were two original German intertitles
from the film with the original typography. Since the style
was very close to the style chosen for the first Munich
reconstruction, we decided to continue to use that
typography, thus saving us the cost of redoing every single
intertitle. The credits at the beginning of the film were
also done in the same style and were put together using
various sources, since again no direct documentation on the
film credits survives.
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We encountered one last problem while trying to put our
tinting scheme into practice. It is of course no longer
possible to tint and tone, as in the days of silent film
when every positive print was put together from shots that
had been individually dunked in a dye bath. Furthermore, we
knew that the dyes in the original tints and tones had most
probably faded, so that it was not really possible to
recreate the original colours. Working together with the
Cinemateca di Bologna which was responsible for all the lab
work, we decided instead to use the "Desmet-Method" which
involved generating a black and white negative, and then
flashing the colour print material with coloured lights,
before exposing the material to the negative.
(11)
The advantage of this method was that we could colour
material that had been previously black and white, and our
new dupe negative would not be subject to colour fading, as
so many colour negatives made during the past forty years
have been. After a whole battery of colour tests, we were
able to achieve tints and tones that roughly approximated
the colours in the surviving nitrates. The new colour print
was premiered at the "Cinema di Retrovato" Film Festival in
Bologna in June
1997.(12)
VII. Conclusion
Everyone who has seen the new reconstruction of The
joyless street agrees that it is a vast improvement over
all previously existing versions. Yet it remains only a
subjective attempt at a reconstruction. While it is true
that the reconstruction team tried to base every one of it
decisions on documentary evidence, it must also be admitted
that without a surviving original German version, we will
never know what the film really looked like. It is, for
instance, possible that Pabst actually included mismatched
shots in his edit, because he probably rightly assumed that
no one would look at every shot that closely, and the
precepts of classical narrative editing were only beginning
to fall in place, at least in Europe. Given the incredible
complexity of the narrative, involving at least six
different subplots, and the fact that the film is still
missing at least 700 meters, this version must be
characterized as at attempt at a reconstruction. A rolling
title at the beginning of the film in fact characterizes the
film as such, and gives a brief description of the process
described above. In is not our intention that future
historians mistake the Munich edit for Pabst's original
version.
This version was created according to certain well-defined
theses, concerning the nature of Pabst's work. In this
sense, it is both a film and a meta-film. Future film
historians when dealing with this or any other film are
going to have to be much more exact in their definition of
the text. They can no longer assume that the print they are
viewing and analyzing is anything more than one possible
text, making their reading only one of many possible
readings. Just as philologists have long assumed that they
must reveal the provenance of the literary text under
discussion, so too must film historians spend much more
time, defining the exact characteristics of their particular
texts. Not only are we dealing with release versions,
rerelease versions, and "director's" cuts, each individual
print shows the ravages of time, making it a unique object.
The work of the film archivist is to discover the best
possibleur-text, using all the methodologies and
documentary evidence at their disposal, while resisting the
urge to improve both the technical and the aesthetic quality
of the work, just because modern laboratory methods make it
possible. At the end of the day, though, there must always
be the realization that any reconstruction is as much a work
of subjectivity as it is of documentary truth.
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(11)
This method was developed by Karl Desmet at the Cinematheque
Royale de Belgique (Brussels) and has become standard
practice at many archives. Other archives still prefer to
make a colour dupe negative of the original nitrate and work
from that. The advantage of colour film is that it is more
vibrant, even if it distorts the original colour tinting.
Clearly, in the case of The joyless street, a colour
negative was not an option, given the extreme homogeneity of
the material.
(12)The reconstruction of The joyless
street took three staff persons a total of one and a
half years to complete, of which half a year was spent on
research and documentation, half a year at the editing
table, and half a year creating new titles and a colour
print.
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